The FINANCIAL — IBM on February 8 has revealed its new Power7 processor architecture as well as a number of systems based on the chip.
The Power7 systems will be tailored for specific projects, such as running electrical grids or financial analytics, Rodney Adkins, senior vice president for systems and technology, said last week in an interview, Bloomberg reports. The systems, made of integrated servers, software and storage, will start selling this month.
The release marks the first new systems since Adkins took over IBM’s hardware division in October, after predecessor Bob Moffat left the company amid the Galleon Group insider-trading scandal, according to the same source. IBM’s focus on project-specific systems, along with investments in research and development, will help it gain market share even as Oracle starts selling similar servers with its acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc., he said.
The processor is a big step for IBM, integrating eight processing cores in one chip package, with each core capable of executing four tasks–called "threads"–turning an individual chip into a virtual 32-core processor, CNET News informs. As a yardstick, Intel's high-end Xeon processors–systems that Power7 will compete with–typically have two threads per processing core.
New Power7 systems
The new Power7 systems include:
IBM Power 780: a new category of scalable, high-end servers, featuring an advanced modular design with up to 64 Power7 cores.
IBM Power 770: a midrange system with up to 64 Power7 cores, featuring higher performance per core than Power6 processors and using up to 70 percent less energy for the same number of cores as Power6 processors.
IBM Power 755: a high-performance computing cluster node with 32 Power7 cores.
IBM officials are looking to press their advantage, having gained 12 points of market share in the $14 billion Unix space since 2005 and more than 2,200 HP and Sun server and storage customers over the same time span, EWeek reports. “We view the Unix market as very, very robust and mission-critical, and with [the Power7] platform, we have a perfect spot in the market,” Scott Handy, vice president of worldwide marketing and strategy for IBM’s Power systems platform, said in an interview.
With the new Power7 systems, IBM is offering greater performance while consuming less energy than their predecessors, according to Handy, the same source informs.The servers also dovetail with IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative, with capabilities to not only process large amounts of data, but also to analyze that data at the same time. According to IBM, the Power7 servers deliver twice the performance and four times the virtualization capabilities for the same price as the Power6 servers, all the while consuming half the energy. They also offer better price for performance than comparable systems from Sun and HP.
Hardware sales make up 17 percent of Armonk, New York-based IBM’s total revenue, which topped $95 billion last year, Bloomberg reports. The company is the world’s third-largest software maker, trailing Microsoft Corp. and Redwood City, California-based Oracle.
According to the same source, IBM offered to buy Sun for about $7 billion last year, according to people familiar with the matter. Oracle ultimately acquired Sun for $7.4 billion, and the deal closed last month.
Discussion about this post